


Deep Greens and Blues

by groveofbones



Series: Down in My Dreams [2]
Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Families of Choice, Family Feels, Gen, I Send Characters Camping in My Favorite Places
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-31 17:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21149489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groveofbones/pseuds/groveofbones
Summary: Ana and her family don't stay in one place for long, trying to stay ahead of any pursuit. In the process, Ana starts to understand her family a little better.





	Deep Greens and Blues

“Here,” K said. “This is yours.”

Ana looked up from where she was re-rolling her sleeping bag. K was holding out something small, wooden, dirty and charred in places. Her old toy horse.

Ana sucked in a breath, memories hitting her like a physical blow. She reached out a suddenly unsteady hand to take it.

The wood was warm from K’s hand. She turned the horse over and over, examining it from every side.

“You remember it too, now,” she said. “It’s yours, too.”

He just smiled a little, the genuine smile. She’d come come to realize that he had a fake smile, too, a head-ducked, ingratiating smile, but that the genuine one was smaller but more important, because it was real. He reached out and gently closed her fingers around the horse.

“Thank you,” she said. That was how it started.

***

What it was was that she wanted to give him something, something that would mean as much to him as the horse had meant to her. Something that would show him that he was a part of the family, at least as much as she was. He had seemed surprised when Rick and Ana had taken him with them, and though the surprise had diminished with each morning that they set out on the road with him accompanying them, she still wasn’t sure that he felt like he belonged.

That was the problem, really. She still wasn’t sure what he felt about much of anything. It was something he had in common with Rick, a lot of the time. Maybe it was a Blade Runner thing. She had never made much of an effort to hide her emotions. (Who would she have hidden them from, anyway?) It could feel a bit lonely, not being sure what they were thinking. 

Of course, Rick was kind to her and had helped her when she was sick, had taught her the things that she’d need to know to survive outside the cities with seemingly endless patience. He did that for K, too. She thought Rick was happy to have them around, even beyond being happy to have found his long-lost daughter. She thought that maybe Rick loved them. And she thought K was glad to be with her and Rick, too, even beyond being glad to have someone traveling with him and watching his back. But still. She wasn’t entirely sure, and it got a little lonely, not being entirely sure. A different sort of loneliness than the kind she had felt alone in her little clean room, but still lonely.

It would be hard to figure out what to give someone when she wasn’t sure how to read him. Not to mention that she didn’t really have much to work with. It wasn’t like she could go down to the store.

And she’d never gotten someone a gift before, other than flowers or a bottle of wine, ordered over the Internet to be sent to a colleague after they’d completed a project. She’d never been close enough to anyone before to have gotten anything else.

So, all in all, it was a bit of a daunting proposition. But she was determined.

***

“Yeah,” Rick told her, “that’s right. That’s pretty much a perfect slip knot.”

Ana held the knot up in front of her, examining it in satisfaction. “Finally,” she said.

“It takes some time to learn,” Rick said. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. But it’s one of those little skills that’ll make a difference, out here.”

Ana looked out over the landscape in front of them. They’d stopped at an abandoned farmhouse in the hills at the foot of a mountain range that Rick said was once called the Sierra Nevadas. She could see the mountains from where they sat on the front porch of the farmhouse, a rising tide of rock colored deep greens and blues by the growth of tremendous forests, stretching as far in that direction as she could see. 

When she turned to look in the direction they’d come, she could see the flat land they’d crossed on their way here, stretching off in the direction of the cities and the sea. The land was gray and bleak. If she remembered right, from her occasional obsessions with reading history, there had once been rich farmland there, but it had been overworked to the point of becoming nothing more than barren dust. The farms had started to creep up the foothills, leaving the land behind them gray as they climbed, for ever diminishing returns, until people had seen the writing on the wall and given up, moving back down into the valley to carve waterways for growing algae and build enormous hive-like silos for raising mealworms. The kind of food that formed the staples of life in the cities.

Now, there was almost no one in this landscape to see Ana and her family pass. 

They’d been zigzagging up in the mountains, taking short jumps in the car and spending their days salvaging what they could from the buildings and structures they found on the way. Apart from some nerve-wracking moments in the first few days, they hadn’t seen any sign of anything that could be pursuit from Tyrell. Still, Ana appreciated the caution. Unlike Rick and K, she hadn’t met Tyrell or seen first-hand the lengths to which he would go to contain and control her, but just the thought of him, and the fear in Rick’s and K’s eyes, was enough for her.

She had just found her freedom after so many years without it, after all. She wasn’t ready to give it up just yet. 

“You should practice it again,” Rick said, bringing her out of her thoughts. “It’s a pretty versatile tool. You never know when your life might depend on it.” He smiled slightly when he said it, though, as if to take some of the harshness of their life out of his words. He’d been smiling more in the past few days, Ana thought. 

“Rick?” she asked, as she unpicked her knot so she could tie it again. “Do you think we’ll ever go back to a city?”

Rick sat back in his chair, frowning as he thought. “I… I really don’t know. I used to know which cities had extradition treaties with Los Angeles, but it’s been a while since I kept up on inter-city relationships. My information is probably all out of date.”

“So it would be safer not to go to one?” Ana tried to say it casually, but her grip had tightened on the rope. 

Rick, of course, noticed. “Do you want to go to one?” he asked. “Do you want to be back in a city?” When she didn’t answer for a moment, he said, “I’d understand if you did. It’s not the easiest life out here. There’s a lot we can’t do.”

“It’s not that.” Ana considered, lining up the two ends of the knot as she thought. “I mean, yeah, my apartment was luxurious, but… I guess it feels like I should miss city life more, but I don’t. I don’t miss it at all. But if you do…”

“The happiest days of my life have been spent outside of Los Angeles,” Rick said definitively, and Ana smiled down at the rope in her hands. 

“Do you… Do you think K misses it? Los Angeles, I mean?”

“I’m not sure I know all of what’s going on in that kid’s head,” Rick answered. Ana snorted an inelegant laugh. She was glad that she wasn’t the only one. “But I think that if he misses anything, it’s not the city itself. I can’t imagine it was that easy, being one of the police force’s pet replicants.”

“Do you know anything about it? About what it was like to, I mean, what his life was like?”

“No. I left LA long before Tyrell stepped in. In my day, Blade Runners were all human. Or, I suppose… There should be another word, other than human, it doesn’t seem right to say human and mean that people like Rachel and K aren’t part of it. But anyway.” Rick shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it, but I… No, I’m not going to put words in his mouth. Whatever his life meant to him, I don’t think he minds being out here.”

“It’s not so bad,” Ana said, glancing up at the mountains again. “It’s not as easy as being in the city, but there’s some good things about it.”

Rick’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Living in LA isn’t always that easy, either. I’ve seen people living in places… Well. It doesn’t matter now. But I think you’ve got a point, about the good things.” He looked in the same direction as her for a little while, then continued, “Your mother used to like sitting out on days like this. She liked the quiet, the way every little breeze made a noise that you could notice. It wasn’t drowned out by anything. I thought it was so strange at first, but… She convinced me.”

Ana felt something like a clenching in her chest. She liked the quiet, too. She watched the wind create little valleys in the grass in front of the farmhouse and thought about how strange it was, to have parents that she could have something in common with.

“Rick?” she asked. 

“Hmm?” he answered.

“Do you think K needs anything?” she asked, remembering her purpose, the thing she was trying to accomplish. 

“Needs anything? I mean, I think the risk of infection in the knife wound is past, if he doesn’t overextend himself it should heal fine. And I’m not sure what kind of failsafes Tyrell built into his models, but…”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Ana cut him off. “I meant… Do you think there’s anything that would make him happy? That he doesn’t have now?”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” She looked over at Rick, puzzled. “The way he isn’t quite sure about us yet. That’s what’s on your mind, right?” She nodded. It was, in a way. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Living as a Blade Runner, you’ve got to be on your guard all the time. It’s… Well, it’ll just take him some time.” Rick clapped a hand on Ana’s shoulder. Rick was doing that more often, too, and so was Ana, starting to feel like it was okay. They’d even hugged a couple times. “He’ll get there, Ana. He’s getting there.”

“I’m glad,” Ana said, and held up her new knot. “How does this one look?”

***

The house they’d spotted from the car was beautiful, all dark wood, built into the side of a hill so that the ground was higher at the back than at the front. There were the remains of a garden stretching out around the front door; Ana could see broken trellises and the ghosts of the lines where the beds were walled off. One window in the front was broken, but it looked like the rest were intact. It commanded an incredible view. They’d found the gravel path leading to it branching off from a narrow paved road winding up into the mountains, and the house looked out over a wooded slope and down into the hazy valley. The land around used to be a National Forest, or so Rick said.

There was no one around. Everything was quiet. All they could hear was the sound of birds and the occasional rustle of a small animal in the underbrush. 

“Hello?” Rick called. His voice was light, but Ana could see that he was holding onto his gun, under his coat. “Anyone in there?”

There was no answer. 

“Spread out,” Rick said in a low voice. “Ana to the left, K to the right. I’ll go up the center. If you hear anything, run.”

Ana and K did as told, and they moved up the drive toward the house like the points of a triangle. They had been observing the house from the tree line for over an hour and hadn’t seen any signs of life inside, so Ana didn’t think it was too likely they’d be attacked, but you never knew. She appreciated Rick’s caution. She appreciated that he was trying to keep them all alive.

They made their way slowly toward the door, but nothing happened. No voices told them to stop, no shots rang out. Rick walked up to the front door and tried it. “It’s locked,” he called to them. 

“One second,” K answered, and went to the broken window. He used his jacket-clad elbow to knock out the rest of the shards of broken glass, then grabbed the top of the window frame and swung himself through. A moment later, they heard his footsteps and the click of the lock, and the front door opened. 

“See anyone?” Rick asked.

K shook his head. “Didn’t hear anyone, either.”

They stayed together once they were inside, with Rick in the lead, checking each room in turn. There didn’t seem to be anyone. 

They had seen so many houses like this one, on their travels, places where people had started to make a home but had to abandon it for whatever reason. She’d never seen one so intact before, though. Except for the broken window, and a bit of mold in the corners here and there, this house could almost be lived in just as it was. 

It took them well over an hour to check every room and every potential hiding place. When they were done, they found themselves back in the front hallway, in front of the door they’d come in by. 

“What do you think happened to them?” Ana asked. “The people who lived here.”

Rick shrugged. “Not sure. They don’t seem to have taken much with them when they left, and there aren’t any signs of some kind of fight or anything. Maybe they left home and couldn’t get back.”

“We could stay here for a while,” K suggested in a low voice. 

Rick nodded. “We could. I’d be in favor of that. Sound alright to you two?” Ana and K nodded. “Okay. Then now that we know no one’s going to come leaping out of a cupboard at us, why don’t we split up and check the house over for anything that might be useful or that we want to take with us. K and I can divide the first floor, Ana, why don’t you take the second? It covers less space.”

Ana nodded and climbed the stairs. At the top was a hallway, lined with five doors. She tried each one in turn. 

A master suite, with a walk-in closet and its own bathroom. A pipe had burst somewhere in the bathroom wall, and the wall was stained and moldering, and everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, but the bed still looked inviting. She didn’t lie down on it, though. She could only imagine the dust cloud that would result. She looked through the medicine cabinet, took every pill bottle she could find, figuring they’d sort through them later, and got all the first aid supplies, too. Then she raided the closet and chests of drawers, taking any clothes that looked sturdy or warm. 

Behind three of the other doors were two more bedrooms and another bathroom. She repeated the procedure there, piling her finds in the hallway. 

Finally, she opened the last door, expecting another bedroom. Instead, she found a room that looked kind of like her old workshop in her apartment. There was a desk against one wall, placed so that the person sitting in it could look out the window, and an armchair against another wall, with a small table beside it. The rest of the wall space was taken up by bookshelves. 

She went to the desk first. There was nothing on it but a pad of paper and a pen. The drawer was full of other pens and a few mismatched electrical cords. She pulled out the cords and leaned into the hallway to toss them on the pile.

That done, she felt like she could take her time with the rest of the room. There weren’t very many paper books in her price range, but she’d managed to buy a couple when she’d lived in Los Angeles. A collection like this one had to be old, or it would have been famous. 

The table next to the armchair had a single book on it, next to an extremely strange-looking machine that looked like a wood and metal box with a flower-shaped horn growing out of it. She waved her hand in front of it, seeing if she could turn it on, but it didn’t respond. She looked around on it for buttons, but didn’t see any. The only moving part seemed to be a round plate on the top of the box and an arm on the side that ended in a needle. 

She frowned at the machine, but couldn’t figure out anything else about it. She’d show it to Rick, see if he knew what it was. 

She turned to the shelves, going systematically through each one, from the top left to the bottom right. Almost all of the shelves were taken up by books, with the exception of one shelf that had a long box on it. When she opened it up, it was full of square paper sleeves holding round plastic disks that she didn’t recognize. They didn’t look useful, so she replaced the lid of the box and turned her attention back to the books. There were books on all kinds of subjects, but most of them seemed to be fiction, and most of the fiction seemed to be about people traveling through space. She pulled a few books out and looked at their covers, with colorful stars and nebulae and rockets speeding through the blackness. 

One in particular caught her eye, and she held it in the light coming in through the grimy window. She’d have to be careful with the pages, she thought, but it had been kept in a closed room, pressed between other books, for so many years that it had avoided the damage it could have undergone. She wanted to read everything in the room, but she couldn’t carry them all, and in any case, it seemed disrespectful to strip bare a room that must have meant so much to the person who had owned it. So she’d take only the one book. She set it down on the seat of the armchair and picked up the book that had been left on the table, slotting it in to the place that her book had left. 

She tucked her book under her arm and went back into the hallway, gathering up the pile she’d put together and carrying it down the stairs. Rick and K had already been making a pile of their own finds near the front door, and she added hers to theirs. 

“Find some things?” Rick asked behind her, coming out of what looked to be a kitchen with an armful of cans. 

“Yup,” Ana said. “Some clothes and medical things. Also, there’s books up there.” She held up the book she’d picked out for herself. “I took one to read. And there’s a really strange machine that won’t seem to turn on.”

“A strange machine?” Rick asked, furrowing his brow in concern. “I should take a look at that. I’m pretty much done down here, anyway. K, you want to come with?”

K ducked out of a doorway into a bathroom with a few rolls of bandages. “Sure.”

They headed up the stairs together in a line, following Ana. She guided them to the room with all the books and stepped inside, gesturing toward the machine on the table. “That’s it. It’s got some moving parts, but I don’t know how to get it to work.”

Rick looked at the machine, and Ana watched the an expression of surprise cross his face. Then he walked up to the machine and examined it all over, and then he laughed. 

“I can’t believe there’s one of these here. I saw one in a rich guy’s house in LA once, back when I was a Blade Runner, and looked it up online after. There aren’t too many of these left. This is really obsolete technology.”

“What does it do?” K asked.

“It plays music. But you need another piece. There should be disks somewhere, flat disks with a hole in the middle and grooves all over them. You put the disk here,” he touched the spinning platform, “and put the needle in one of the grooves, and it makes music come out of this,” he touched the big bell extending from the box. 

“How does it do that?” Ana asked. 

“I don’t really know,” Rick said, and gave an abashed laugh that made him sound younger. “There’s some scientific reason that it does what it does, but I didn’t pay much attention. Just wanted to know how to work it.”

“Disks, right?” Ana said, realizing where she’d seen something like that and pulling down the long box from the shelf. She set it on the armchair and flipped the lid open. “Disks like these?”

“Yeah,” Rick said, riffling through the paper sleeves. “Just like these. Hold on, let me see if I can get this right.”

He pulled out one of the sleeves. It was marked with a cartoonish image of a tree with two birds in the branches, huddled together. Above the branches of the tree were the words “Lullaby of Birdland.” 

Rick slid the disk out of the sleeve, handling it carefully. “You’ve got to try not to scratch it,” he said, holding the disk by its edges with the tips of his fingers, “otherwise it won’t play right.” He set the disk onto the round plate and took hold of the arm with the needle. “Moment of truth,” he said, and carefully set the needle down into one of the grooves.

The plate began spinning, the needle moving along the groove, and a crackle of static crunched out of the bell of the machine. Then, there was a wobbly swell of strings, distant and juddering, as if she was hearing it through an ocean of crumpled plastic wrap. 

The strings grew bigger and bigger with their opening melody, then dropped off suddenly to a background hum, and a woman’s voice began singing. 

_Oh lullaby of birdland_

_That’s what I_

_Always hear_

_When you sigh_

_Never in my wordland_

_Could there be ways to reveal_

_In a phrase how I feel_.

She’d never heard a woman sing like that before. She’d listened to plenty of music on the radio as she worked, but she’d never heard a voice in that style before. There were no drums, behind her, no beat, nothing but the woozy drone of the strings, doing nothing to distract from the deep, deep voice of the woman, which didn’t even seem to keep to a set time, instead drawing itself out and then compressing itself like a flow of syrup. 

“Is this what all old music sounds like?” she asked Rick. 

“Some of it,” Rick answered. “Music from this time, I suppose. There’s a lot of music that could qualify as ‘old’, you know.” 

He was teasing her, she realized, but she was too distracted by the possibilities to think too much about it. That box would be full of music from the old days, when people listened to music on machines like this. And all of it would be so _different_ from anything she’d heard before. 

_And there’s a weepy old willow_

_He really knows how to cry_

_That’s how I’d cry on my pillow_

_If you should tell me farewell and goodbye_

***

They spent a few days in the house, resting somewhere that was mostly put together and sorting through everything they’d decided to take. 

Their routine stayed mostly the same as it was when they were in abandoned farmhouses, or underground compounds, or any other bit of shelter they found, with one exception: occasionally, by themselves or in pairs or all three together, they’d slip away to that upstairs room and find one of the paper-wrapped disks to play.

Ana had been right: they were all different. She liked the ones that were similar to Lullaby of Birdland best, although she couldn’t tell if this was because it was the best style to her ear or because it was the one she had heard first. She’d found a couple other records like it, with the same smoky-voiced women singing slow and then fast over the hum of strings. 

There were other styles, too, faster or slower, more instruments or fewer or just different, long songs or short songs, so many that it was impossible to keep track of. Rick knew something about music, apparently, and told her things about what they listened to, around when the style was popular, where it came from, but she forgot as much as she learned, she felt like. There was just so _much_. 

Rick preferred piano music, no matter the style, Ana noticed. He would stand at the window of the room, his hand on the desk, and look out at the mountains and forest beyond, listening with a slight smile on his face. 

“Your mother played,” Rick said when Ana asked him about it. “I did too, a long time ago. I’d given up on it by the time I met her. There wasn’t room for anything like that, for _making_ anything, when I was a Blade Runner. But she played. She loved music.” After that, the sound of the piano seemed different than the sound of any other instrument, to her. It always caught her attention, no matter what else she was doing.

K seemed to prefer slow songs; she’d find him with something solemn and quiet on the record player, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, looking at the bookshelves with a stare that made it clear he wasn’t seeing anything on them. 

And sometimes, Rick would find a record with a song he’d heard before, something that he recognized, and he’d call them up to the room with a gruff, “Hey, come look at this, would you?” And Ana and K would come up to the room, and trade off who got the armchair and who got the floor, and listen with Rick. 

He would treat it like it was nothing, just shrug and say, “Something I thought you’d be interested in,” but Ana thought that it meant something, that they’d come and listen with him. 

It continued like that for a few days. Ana knew that they couldn’t take the record player and the box of records with them, they were too bulky and would take up too much of their space, but it was nice to have the music, all the same. Even if it was just for a little while. 

They had talked about heading out again within the next three days; comfortable as the house was, it wasn’t exactly a good idea to stay in one place for too long. After all, they were fugitives whose existence threatened the very definitions of humanity. So, since they were not going to have access to the record player for very much longer, on one particular day, Ana decided to go spend some time with it by herself. She wasn’t quite sure what song she’d listen to. Maybe it would be Lullaby of Birdland again. Somehow, it had stayed her favorite. 

But when she reached the top of the stairs, she saw that the room wasn’t empty. K was standing silhouetted in the light from the window, holding a record in his hands, examining the cover. 

At first, Ana was slightly annoyed that he’d already picked something out, but she realized that she was being unfair. She didn’t have a lot of experience living with other people, but she knew enough to know that she had to compromise. She’d listen to what he’d picked out, and then maybe he’d listen to Lullaby of Birdland with her.

As she reached the door of the room, though, she realized that something was wrong. K didn’t even seem to have heard her approach, which made her uneasy; K was like Rick, always hyper-aware of everything going on around him. But he didn’t acknowledge her, just stared at the cover of the record. 

His face was pale, too, and he swayed slightly on his feet. The record wobbled a bit, as if his hands weren’t steady. 

It frightened Ana, a little, to see K like that. Her first instinct was to look for blood, like she was afraid that he had been stabbed again. But he hadn’t. 

“K?” she asked carefully, stepping toward him, trying to see what was on the cover of the record sleeve that had upset him so terribly. “K? Are you alright?”

With what seemed like a tremendous effort, K dragged his eyes away from the record and looked at her. “Yeah, I… I’m okay. Just… I was going to play this, if that’s alright.”

He was polite to her, as he always was, but without the warmth that his voice usually had. He sounded like he had been scoured. 

“What is it?” Ana asked him. She wondered what could possibly be so horrible on this record, and why he’d want to play it anyway. 

He turned the record slightly toward her, so that she could read the title, and she was immediately baffled. The image was of a drawing of a portrait of a man wearing a curly-haired wig, like she had seen on many of the records, and the title read “Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.” Nothing about the cover seemed to be horrifying in any way.

“What’s wrong?” Ana asked him. She took the record out of his hands; he looked almost as though he was going to drop it. It didn’t seem any more frightening up close. 

“I…” K’s voice sounded different than it usually did. She was used to quietly competent K, or to the slight hint of sarcasm and humor that he sometimes got. She wasn’t used to him sounding… small. “I used to know this song.”

“You used to?” Ana asked.

“I… had a friend. She… played this song. She played it a lot.”

Ana thought, suddenly, of the first morning they had sat together and talked, after leaving Los Angeles. They had talked about love, briefly. He’d said he’d been in love, once, but that she had died. Ana hadn’t asked anything further, or tried to offer any comfort. She hadn’t felt like she’d known K well enough to, then. 

“Do you… Do you want to play it, now? Do you want to listen to it?”

K looked frozen, standing by the window as if he wanted to make a quick escape. He leaned against the wall, hunching his shoulders. “I guess so. Yes, I guess I should.”

He still hesitated, though. He didn’t move toward Ana. He didn’t try to take the record back.

“Do you… Do you want me to stay? To listen to it with you?”

K let out a sharp breath. “Please,” he said quietly. Then he slid down the wall to sit on the floor, ignoring the chair nearby.

Ana very carefully slid the record out of its paper cover and set it down on the turntable of the record player. She grasped the needle between her thumb and forefinger and set it down, just the way Rick had taught her. 

The music started out quiet, with only the lowest instruments of the orchestra, playing a swift melody that she thought she’d heard somewhere before. It sounded vaguely familiar. It was a nice melody, though, she thought. 

Ana glanced over at K. His face had gone white. He was sitting with his back straight against the wall, his knees up and his fists clenched in the fabric of his pants.

She crossed the room to sit down next to him, her back to the wall, as well. The music added a few of the higher-voiced stringed instruments, and then the violins, lifting the melody up and up. It was like the clouds had parted to let in a single ray of sun, but then kept moving to let in more and more light.

Ana rested her hand on the ground, palm up, between them. It wasn’t a demand, she thought to herself. Just an acknowledgment that she was there.

After a little while, K unclenched one of his own hands from his knee and set it down on hers, carefully, as if he was touching glass. 

Ana curled her fingers around K’s. She kept her face resolutely away from his, her breathing even, and didn’t comment on the way his shoulders shook. 

The music built and built, and outside the boughs of the trees blew gently in the wind. Ana kept one hand in K’s, and one hand in her pocket, where her fingers brushed the back of her little wooden horse, and listened to the music.


End file.
